Leveling Up From Product Seller to Brand Builder

We all know how powerful video marketing can be when it comes to building a brand. Video traffic is expected to make up 82 percent of all Internet traffic by 2022. This spike coincides with the increased production and distribution of videos throughout every industry.

With this in mind, it is important to remember that the value of video marketing for brands is as old as video itself. The difference now is that there are more opportunities to publish them and reach consumers via social media.

Here’s the catch: In a modern world of oversaturation, with more social media users than ever before, sellers have just two seconds to capture the attention of potential customers. Easy, right? WRONG!

That’s why creating “thumb-stopping” content is so important when it comes to video marketing. That is the ultimate goal — to level up from a product seller to a brand builder. Every Amazon product seller who wants long-term success should be figuring out how to make this powerful transition.

Strike a Nerve With Engagement

If you can’t engage a consumer, you can’t sell a consumer. That’s why informing, educating and entertaining the consumer through video is key. The objective of great video is to create an emotional connection between the consumer and the brand. Then leverage that video to create the opportunity for emotional connections with the brand across multiple channels and facilitate hyper growth.

Video marketing starts with establishing that emotional connection, but success doesn’t come easily. Testing your creative is key when it comes to figuring out what’s going to work best, and what’s going to resonate with people.

Don’t take the creative of your video lightly. The bread and butter of your success with video marketing will come from the ability of your ad to cause the viewer to stop scrolling and continue watching. How exactly do you do this?

The 10 Commandments of Video Marketing

Following is a proven 10-step formula for creating video ads that engage, entertain and convert viewers into consumers.

1. Bake In Logo

Your logo should be part of every piece of video content you publish. Baking it in makes it prominent without diverting the viewer’s attention from the video itself. The user will associate your logo with the feelings the video evokes.

2. Close-Up Every 10 Seconds

Ensure the viewer is aware of your video’s focal point. You should do this by having a close-up every 10 seconds. Product placement is a major factor in whether something sells on Amazon or in any other e-commerce setting. The user’s attention span is short — keep your video snappy and engaging.

3. Calls to Action

Calls to action, or CTAs, are critical to success. When viewers see your video, you want them to feel urgency to learn more once it’s over. This is key.

4. 5 Alternative Intros

Creating five alternative intros for each of your videos adds diversity to each piece of content and ensures you avoid oversaturation in the marketplace. Once a video goes viral, the one that users most prefer will begin to gain notoriety as your token marketing asset going forward.

5. Music as an Enhancer, Not a Distractor

While music can complement the goal of your video content, it should not be the primary focus as it’ll distract the viewer. Make sure you own the licensing rights to the music before you include it on any video content. Lawsuits are not fun.

6. Shoot Modular

Your video marketing materials should not consist of an elongated singular clip, but rather multiple clips edited together in succession. This is ideal on multiple fronts. First, it allows you to place different aspects of your marketing campaign throughout a single piece of content. Second this allows you to utilize sections of your videos as standalone 15-, 30- and 60-second assets

7. Quick Cuts

To further stress the importance of video design, you should ensure the presence of quick cuts. This consists of both cut-ins and cut-outs. Both are important for maintaining the attention spans of the viewer. Trust the cut-ins.

8. Speed Up Playback

If you’ve ever watched a video and noticed that it was stylized subtly, it has likely been sped up. Many recommend speeding up your video from 1-12 percent. This is subtle enough for the viewer to interest viewers in watching the entire video playback without feeling something is wrong. This is an industry trick that many have used in the past.

9. Compare and Demonstrate

Throughout your video, you want to be comparing and demonstrating. Users are most likely to become emotionally attached to something that they can compare to something else. Furthermore, a demonstration allows viewers to picture themselves in the same scenario, which helps inspire brand recall and development.

10. Include Social Proof

Trust is a major factor for consumers, and video marketing should abide by this common theme. To establish trust through video, you must include social proof. The proof can be anything from press features to testimonials, but it must be credible and instill confidence in the viewer. Shady testimonials can have the opposite effect and make your content look like an infomercial.

Following the 10 Commandments of video marketing undoubtedly will help you create a video that rises above your competition. The awesome part about modern day video marketing is that it does not need to be expensive. In fact, by utilizing your own team and resources, it can be done for little to no money at all.

Tracking Success Is Holistic

So you created a crazy-good video. Where do you post it, and how do you know if it’s working?

One of the primary pillars of video marketing is to focus on multichannel marketing. In fact, if you focus solely on Amazon, you’re doing it all wrong. Make sure you are publishing videos on YouTube, Facebook, Display, etc.

In fact, 80 percent of 18-29 year-olds are on YouTube, and 70 percent of people use YouTube to help make purchase decisions, but only 9 percent of U.S. businesses are using YouTube advertising, surveys suggest. This is a massive opportunity for marketers to enter into a space that’s not yet oversaturated.

It’s critical to be aware of the plethora of targeting options that are available on various platforms. For example, when it comes to YouTube and display ads, custom intent targeting offers powerful benefits. The beauty here is that you can create a custom intent audience based on something someone has searched in the last 30 days. This type of commercial intent targeting is available in some form across most advertising platforms.

When you focus on marketing your brand holistically, your videos should accomplish much more than Amazon product conversions. If you live and die by Amazon’s metrics, particularly ACoS (average cost of sale), you’ll fail.

Video advertising should grow your brand through website sales, retail sales and Amazon sales. Focus on your brand, not just Amazon. Tracking engagement metrics like comments, likes and shares is indicative of whether people actually like the video. Remember, think emotional connection. From there, translating the success of that video to actual product sales is what facilitates the growth of your brand.

Bottom-line brands that grow look at return on advertising spend, or ROAS, differently. They measure total revenue and lift vs. total advertising investment. They aren’t hyperfocused on what they can track, because they know that doing video right will provide lift that isn’t trackable.

Rapidly growing brands essentially get “their head out of their ROAS” as tracked in platform and focus on overall business growth.

It’s All About Brand, Not Product

Consumers choose brands over products. Think about it: Nobody sets out looking for a knockoff brand when shopping online. Instead, they look for brands that represent something to them as a consumer.

If you can establish yourself as one of those brands, you’ve laid the foundation of future success with e-commerce. Amazon is already its own brand and needs no assistance from you. Once you start thinking of Amazon as a partner and a platform, rather than an enabler, you begin to demand the type of respect for your brand that precipitates long-term growth and ROI.

One thing to keep in mind as a brand builder is that branding does not supersede product quality. Let’s think about a consumer buying from an up-and-coming brand on Amazon. Upon delivery, the shopper experiences major disappointment with the quality and leaves a poor review. Others follow suit. You have damaged your brand and stunted your growth online.

Now think about that scenario with a stronger focus on quality. Your product is excellent, and the reviews reflect that. You have now boosted your brand to new heights.

Facilitating Long-Term Growth

The point of all of this isn’t to create a one-off video that drives sales. Effective video marketing is all about building your brand to beyond a one-time sale. Restricting yourself to being just a product seller on Amazon defeats this concept.

While Amazon is an effective, powerful e-commerce tool, the only way to achieve and sustain long-term success is to establish your brand as valuable, trustworthy and high-quality through multiple channels.

Taking advantage of multiple social media platforms is paramount to attaining the goals you’ve set for your brand. Video marketing is arguably the single most effective marketing method for growing your brand, if done correctly. All it takes is a little bit of creative juice, the right targeting, and multichannel marketing to level up from a product seller to a brand builder.